The Jewish quarterback at a Mormon college

Maybe there just isn't a place for it in America fewer More Jewish than Brigham Young University's football stadium on Yom Kippur. In a typical year, few of the roughly 63,000 fans who packed LaVell Edwards Stadium in Provo, Utah, for the annual homecoming game would have even been aware that Saturday was the holiest day in the Jewish calendar. But this isn't a typical year: BYU's star quarterback, Jake Retzlaff, is Jewish. And he has led the team from Mormon's flagship university to an undefeated start that stunned prognosticators and lifted the Cougars into the top 15 in the national rankings.

It's one of those wonderfully strange college sports stories that attracts camera crews. In recent weeks, both ESPN and CBS have shown up on campus to introduce Retzlaff, and Fox Sports has sent a 140-person team to broadcast his gameday studio show from Provo. There was a lot at stake going into Saturday's game – a win against the University of Arizona Wildcats would not only give the Cougars bowl eligibility, but also the team's chances at a Big 12 championship and a spot in the national playoffs maintained.

There was also a lot at stake for me personally. As a father gradually giving in to stereotypes in his approach to middle age, I had recently embarked on a mission to introduce my young children to my alma mater's college sports fan base. I bought them overpriced royal blue hats and sweatshirts and showed them viral videos of the popular cougar mascot Cosmo doing TikTok dances and jumping through hoops of fire. After I decided to take them to their first BYU football game in Provo last week, I spent days teaching them the fight song. By the time we took our seats Saturday afternoon, the propaganda had done its job – they couldn't wait to belt out, “Stand up and scream, the Cougars are out.”” after every BYU touchdown.

I assured them that they would get plenty of opportunities to sing, but I secretly had my doubts. Arizona's defense was good; BYU's first five wins of the season were strange and somewhat inconsistent. Most importantly, like every BYU fan, I harbored the vaguely superstitious notion that this was the point of the season — when the national hype peaks and people finally notice — that our team usually collapses. As I spoke to fans before the game, I realized I wasn't alone in this fear. One fan even wondered aloud whether Retzlaff's decision to play on Yom Kippur, which many religious Jews spend in prayer and fasting, would curse his performance. He was joking, I thought. But then the Cougars' opening drive ended with Retzlaff missing an open receiver in the end zone on fourth down, and the Wildcats marched down the field to score, and suddenly the specter of divine punishment didn't seem so far-fetched. I wondered if any other nervous BYU fans were Googling How bad is it to play football on the Day of Atonement?

When I met Retzlaff on campus a few days later, I told him of the Mormon's serious concerns about compliance with Jewish law, and he laughed. “This is fandom,” he told me. Retzlaff, wearing sweatpants and a Star of David necklace, said he never seriously considered skipping the game. He knew some Jews would disagree – Sandy Koufax was famous for sitting out the first game of the World Series in 1965 to celebrate Yom Kippur. But for Retzlaff, Saturday's performance was a chance to represent his faith on a stage that isn't exactly full of people like him. Utah has one of the smallest Jewish populations in America, and there are only two other Jewish students at BYU. This puts Retzlaff in a strange position: he represents one of the university's smallest minorities and is at the same time one of its most famous students.

Retzlaff, a California native who spent two years as the top junior college quarterback, told me that his first thought when BYU recruiters showed up was football, not faith. The school has a relatively high-profile program with a strong pedigree – the Cougars won the national championship in 1984 and have produced a number of famous quarterbacks over the years, including Steve Young and Jim McMahon. But he admits that considering what his life outside of football would be like on a 99 percent Mormon campus gave him pause.

BYU, where alcohol, premarital sex and a host of other traditional college pastimes are strictly prohibited, is not an obvious draw for most non-Mormon students. But each year the school attracts a combination of college athletes who want to play their sport without distractions and students from other Orthodox religious backgrounds who don't mind spending time on America's most “ice cold sober” campus. (Last year, a Muslim BYU basketball player named Aly Khalifa made headlines for fasting during a March Madness game that took place during Ramadan.)

Retzlaff told me that his arrival in Provo was a culture shock. Sundays were brutal: Local businesses closed, campus closed, and while most of his teammates were in church, Retzlaff sat alone in his room, struggling to stave off boredom. Mandatory religious instruction, which often began with all students singing a Mormon hymn, could also be confusing. “Every single person around me has this thing memorized,” he recalled, “and I have no idea what’s going on.”

Another player in his position might have chosen to downplay his religious differences; Retzlaff decided to get involved. He began referring to himself as “BYJew” on Instagram and encouraged shy friends and teammates to use the term as well. (Eventually, Utah County Chabad began selling “BYJew” T-shirts.) To celebrate Sukkot last year, he arranged for a kosher food truck from Salt Lake City to visit campus to treat his teammates to kebabs and falafel could. He enjoyed the opportunity to further his education. “Members of the LDS faith have a strange fascination with Judaism,” he told me. Some of the questions he received: “Do you believe in Jesus?” for example – were rudimentary. (“To me, it's like you've never met a Jew in your life,” he told me.) But others were more sophisticated, leading to conversations about the overlapping theologies and shared cultural experiences of two religious minorities, of which the one was very old. the other relatively new.

Latter-day Saint rituals were not his own, but Retzlaff learned to find comfort and even a kind of divine beauty in them. During the team prayers before the game, when all the other players bow their heads, he looks at his friends and teammates in the locker room – and tries to “be present in the moment” while reflecting on his own gratitude.

After the attacks on Israel on October 7 last year, Retzlaff's experience took on a new dimension. As protests against the war in Gaza erupted across America, and many of those protests descended into vicious anti-Semitism, Retzlaff was struck by how different his classmates were from the people in viral video clips in which Jewish students were called names. He suspected that the secularism that prevailed in these other locations played a role. “I would like to ask them about their faith,” Retzlaff told me about the protesters. “What are the chances that they are even faithful? I bet that's not the case.” For all the inconvenience and occasional awkwardness that BYU's deep religious culture might cause him, Retzlaff believes it has enabled his fellow students to avoid viewing his Judaism as a sign of political identity, but as a faith that deserves respect, even reverence.

In fact, Retzlaff told me, as a quarterback at BYU, he was more exposed to anti-Mormonism than anti-Semitism. The year before he joined the team, some University of Oregon fans greeted the Cougars with chants of “Fuck the Mormons.” The school eventually apologized, but Retzlaff told me that he and his teammates continued to face religious taunts at opposing stadiums. He's less outraged by the heckling than by the lack of outrage they seem to provoke. “The blatant disrespect for their faith – that’s something to think about. What if there was a Jewish university that had a Jewish football team, and that's what they said in the stands?” Retzlaff asked me. “Imagine this getting into the newspapers. That would be a big deal.” The casual bigotry and the muted response to it unsettle him. “There are a lot of people who just don’t like Mormons, and for no reason,” he told me. “This has happened to Jews throughout history.”

In the hall on Saturday, Retzlaff and his team found their rhythm in the second quarter. After a perfect 20-yard touchdown pass clinched the game, the Cougars never looked back. They scored 24 unanswered points and forced four turnovers. We sang the fight song until our voices grew hoarse, and when the game ended in a 41-19 loss, my children were converted. I had a Jewish quarterback to thank for helping me pass on my fandom to the next generation.

But BYU's victory wasn't just significant for the Latter-day Saints watching that day. After the game ended, Retzlaff went to the locker room to shower and change, then answered questions at a press conference. Playing like that on Yom Kippur was, he later told me, a “spiritual experience.” He was exhausted and emotional. But before he could leave, he learned that someone was waiting for him in the now largely empty stadium. A Jewish fan had waited more than an hour to take a photo with the quarterback. After shaking Retzlaff's hand and thanking him, the man said he was going home to break his fast.